A
story is told that the Sun and the Wind were having a conversation.
Spotting
a man wearing a jacket, they made a bet who could make him take off
the jacket first. The Wind thought that would be easy. Blowing up
a storm, he huffed and puffed but the man only pulled the jacket
more tightly around him. Now it was the Sun’s turn. His hot
rays poured down upon the earth and the temperature rose. Sweating
from the heat, the man removed his jacket. The Sun’s gentler
approach had won.

This
tale describes the Civil Rights movement. A half century ago, black
people were struggling to gain dignity and
equality in a predominantly white
society. Whites outnumbered them by almost a ten-to-one margin. Was it
possible for this small minority of the population to force whites
to give up their
social advantage or would gentle persuasion work better? Alternatively
put, did black people win the Civil Rights struggle primarily through
their own
militant effort or did they have whites to thank? A little of both would
be my answer.

the
wind blows to force racial change

The
story begins with black people’s emancipation from slavery
and the efforts of Booker T. Washington and others to cope with living
in freedom by adapting to white people’s ways. That approach
was opposed by W.E.B. DuBois, a graduate of Fisk and Harvard universities
who later became a principal founder and publications director of
the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).
Founded in 1909, this became a political and legal vehicle to aid
black people struggling for equality. One of its principal activities
was to file lawsuits challenging Jim Crow laws in the south. The
NAACP supported the Scottsboro Boys, challenged the southern “white
primary” system, and opposed lynching. Perhaps its greatest
victory came in the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court case, Brown v. Board
of Education, which outlawed racial segregation in the public schools.

Rosa
Parks was secretary of the NAACP’s chapter in Montgomery,
Alabama. On December 1, 1955, she refused to give up her seat to
a white passenger
on a racially segregated local bus. Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., pastor
of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, organized a black boycott
of the public bus system that lasted more than a year. Ultimately, the
U.S. District Court ruled against racial segregation on public
buses in Montgomery.
Dr. King went on to found the Southern Christian Leadership Conference
in 1957, and then to organize demonstrations and marches, including
the famous
1963 March on Washington, for more than a decade until he was assassinated
on April 4, 1968, at the Lorraine motel in Memphis, Tennessee.

Martin
Luther King was a Baptist preacher drawn to Gandhi’s philosophy
of nonviolent protest, whose mode of activity resembled that of a labor
leader. Union officials such as Walter P. Reuther, head of the
auto workers, gave
him political support. So, in the story of the NAACP, Rosa Parks, Martin
Luther King, and others there was black-led political struggle in which
blacks, though assisted by whites, themselves gained the victory.
In terms of our
opening parable, they stirred things up to the point that the southern
segregationist was forced to take off his jacket of racial restrictions,
if only to avoid
the bad publicity.

It
should also be noted that there was a “good
cop - bad cop” aspect
to this struggle. Dr. King and his supporters were the “good
cops” -
they were Christians who advocated and practiced non-violence. The
bad cops were others in the black community such as the Black Muslims,
who
advocated
racial separation and developed a para-military contingent for self-defense.
From a Christian and Jewish perspective, their Muslim identity put
them outside the fold of the “good” people.

Other,
even worse “cops” were the blacks who engaged in violence
or advocated this as a path to freedom. There were the Black Panthers
of Oakland, California, whose members espoused “Black Power” and
carried guns. Some of its members were convicted of murder. Before
that, Robert F. Williams, president of the Monroe, North Carolina,
chapter of the
NAACP, led a movement that favored blacks arming themselves to fight
the Ku Klux Klan.

In
1961, the FBI put out a warrant for Williams’ arrest
on kidnapping charges. He fled to Cuba where he published a book, “Negroes
with Guns”,
and made regular radio addresses to southern blacks on a station
known as “Radio
Free Dixie”. Williams later lived in China before returning
to the United States in 1969. Ironically, his services as an expert
on China were
then eagerly sought by the government as Nixon and Mao began their
rapprochement.

Finally,
there were the anonymous blacks who rioted and set fire to a number
of large American cities in the 1960s.
There were riots
in
Harlem
and Philadelphia
in 1964. In 1965, a five-day riot in the Watts neighborhood of
Los Angeles killed 34 persons, injured 1,032 others, and damaged
or destroyed
1,000
buildings. Likewise, in Detroit, in the 1967 riots, 43 persons
were killed, 467 were
injured, and over 2,000 buildings were burned to the ground.
When Martin Luther King was assassinated in April 1968, riots broke
out in 115
cities across the nation. Some of the worst were in Chicago,
Boston,
Detroit,
and Washington, D.C. The idea was, after Dr. King’s assassination,
that, if whites would not listen to a man of peace, their communities
would burn.

The
heavyweight boxer, Muhammad Ali, played another part in this drama.
In some respects, he belonged to the “bad” group.
He was a Muslim sometimes seen with Malcolm X whispering in
his ear. His profession as a
boxer evoked violence. Yet, he also enjoyed popularity and
respect among whites. Ali was a champion - winner of the gold medal
in
light heavyweight
boxing at the 1960 Olympics who became the world’s heavyweight
champion as the result of an upset victory over Sonny Liston
in 1964. He was good-looking
and articulate, and had a touch of culture as evidenced by
reciting short lines of poetry before his bouts.

Muhammad
Ali was a hero to white anti-war protesters for being
a conscientious objector during the Vietnam war. “I ain’t
got no quarrel with them Viet Cong ... They never called me
nigger,” he explained. In insisting
that sports writers call him by his new name instead of Cassius
Clay, Ali pioneered the politics of language. In the ring,
he promised to “float
like a butterfly, sting like a bee.” He was, in his own
words, “the
greatest”. He was, in any event, a black man who stood
up for himself and his beliefs.

ideology
gives way to sports and entertainment

Muhammad
Ali is a kind of transition figure between blacks who tried to force
integration politically and those who used charm. Keep in mind that
America had entered the entertainment age. African-American culture
was then in the process of influencing an American pop culture that
had become worldwide. Black people had provided models of entertainment
for whites since the days of the minstrel shows. Now their music
was setting the trend. As entertainers, they were getting respect.

It
may have started in the sports field. A black boxer like Jack Johnson
gained respect when, in 1910, he showed he could beat a white champion
like James Jeffries. Then came Joe Louis in the 1930s and 1940s.
Most of the heavyweight
boxing champions in recent years have been black. A black sprinter, Jesse
Owens, won four gold medals in the 1936 Olympic games in Berlin. In the
sport of baseball, black players competed in a separate league until
Branch Rickey,
manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers, put Jackie Robinson in the Dodger’s
starting lineup for the 1947 season. Robinson played for ten seasons and
had a career batting average of .311. Black athletes have also had outstanding
records in football, basketball, and other professional sports.

Those
performances commanded respect. But a greater contribution came in
the black influence
on popular music. In the early part of the 20th century,
symphonic music that had been created by European composers entertained
audiences everywhere. Blacks had limited impact on this type of music.
However, Americans
were also becoming interested in ragtime and jazz which had originated
in the black community. Black Gospel music became popular. In the 1950s,
a new
musical genre called rock ‘n roll took the nation by storm. Such
music had its roots in the black community although Elvis Presley and
other white
singers were its principal popularizers.

In
the 1960s, American politics was at a crossroads. There was the “old
left”, consisting of communists, socialists, and labor-oriented
groups. There was the “new left”, consisting of people
like Tom Hayden, the yippies, and race activists. A principal difference
between
these two
groups was that the former was focused on serious ideas and had plans
for changing the world. The people in the new left were media conscious.
They
were more into personal freedom and wanted to have fun. “I’m
a Marxist,” read one tee shirt: “Groucho, not Karl.” Groucho
Marx made people laugh; his distant relative Karl was the grim ideologue
behind the Cold War.

Young
middle-class Americans were then creating a new culture that combined
the fight for racial equality with anti-war
activism, drug
experimentation,
free love, and an appreciation of rock ‘n roll music. John Lennon,
chief songwriter of the Beatles, had a clear picture of what was happening.
His song, “Revolution”, told of change from the old to
a new type of culture. Two stanzas, in particular, tell the story:

“When
you want money for minds that hate,
all I can say, brother, is you’ll have to wait.”

If
that message was not specific enough, there was also this:

“But
when you start carryin’ pictures of Chairman Mao,
you ain’t gonna make it with anyone anyhow.”

In
other words, the old-style leftist politics was no longer cool. Why
be angry? If you want
to make it with the chicks, you’ll need to go with
the new program which is really no program at all but a pursuit
of individual freedom and just having fun.

the
sun shines on the desegregationist cause

With
respect to race relations, attitudes were changing in America.
There was a grudging recognition, after World War II, that the
nation should not deny equal citizenship to returning black veterans
of that war. There was also what I call the “Mississippi-Chicago
connection”. It had two parts, a negative and a positive.

The
negative was the murder of Emmett Till. Till was a 14-year-old
black male from Chicago who went down to visit his uncle in the
town of Money,
Mississippi, in August 1955. Knowing little of southern customs, he made
the mistake of whistling at a white woman while leaving a grocery store.
Several days later, he disappeared. Till’s body was found at the
bottom of the Tallahatchie river. A 70-pound fan was tied to his neck
with barbed wire. Two white men were put on trial for the murder. An
all-white
jury acquitted them after deliberations lasting about an hour.

Emmett
Till’s body was taken back to Chicago for burial. His mother,
Mamie Till Bradley, insisted that the casket be left open at the funeral
parlor so people could see her son’s badly disfigured face. An
estimated 50,000 people filed past the coffin. Photographs of the corpse
appeared
in several publications, creating an international uproar. Look magazine
paid the acquitted killers $4,000 to tell their story. Safe from double
prosecution, they freely admitted that they had murdered Till. Now
there could be no doubt that justice had miscarried. Whites as well
as blacks
could see the ugly face of racial discrimination in the South. The
country was ready for racial change.

On
a more positive note, a self-taught blues musician named McKinley
Morganfield from rural Mississippi came up to Chicago in 1940 and,
after returning
to Mississippi for two years, again in 1943. He was a musician skilled
on the guitar who called himself “Muddy Waters”. His
story is told in the 2008 film, “Cadillac Records”. This
film is about Chess Records, a recording studio in Chicago which
developed
the
blues talents of black artists like Muddy Waters, “Little Walter” Jacobs, “Howlin’ Wolf” (Chester
Burnett), and female vocalist Etta James in the 1940s and 1950s.

Muddy
Waters’ music was inspired by two blues artists who were
popular in the south in the 1930s. After he moved to Chicago in
1943, Waters
drove a truck and worked in a factory while playing music at night
in clubs.
His uncle gave him an electric guitar. In 1946, Waters began recording
songs for the Aristocrat label, later renamed “Chess Records”,
owned by Leonard and Phil Chess. His 1948 recordings, “I
Can’t
be Satisfied”, “I Feel Like Going Home” and “Rollin’ Stone”,
became big hits. Playing in night clubs with several other musicians,
Muddy Waters dominated the blues scene in Chicago in the early
1950s.

The
film points out that Leonard Chess gave Muddy Waters and the studio’s
other top performers their own Cadillacs. At the peak of his
career in 1954, Waters seemed to have it all - fame and fortune,
hot women,
and a
shiny, expensive, new car - not bad for a former sharecropper
from Mississippi. However, jealousy and dissension developed between
the performers. Several
band members struck out on their own. As record sales grew, there
was a suspicion that Chess was taking out too much in profits
and
not giving
his performers their fair share of the money.

Certain
disk jockeys were requiring a cut of record sales. Worst of all,
by the late ‘50s,
Waters’ popularity as a blues musician was waning as rock ‘n
roll became the new craze.
The limelight now shifted to another black singer, Chuck Berry,
who had pioneered the new sound. In 1955, Chess Records recorded
his
song, “Maybellene”;
it sold one million copies and topped the Rhythm and Blues
charts. Other hits that followed included “Rock and Roll
Music”, “Sweet
Little Sixteen” and “Johnny B. Goode”. Berry
became friends with Carl Perkins and, in 1957, toured with
the Everly Brothers, Buddy
Holly, and other white rock musicians. The film suggested that
white artists such as the Beach Boys were ripping off Berry’s
music. They took his songs, made a few changes, and then put
out their own versions without
paying royalties. Rock ‘n roll music was largely a black
creation, but whites reaped most of the rewards.

Satisfaction
came in the 1960s when several British rock stars
acknowledged their debt to the black musical pioneers. The
Rolling Stones told
Waters that their group was named after one of his early
hits. John Lennon
of the Beatles (named after Buddy Holly and the Crickets)
said: “If
you tried to give rock and roll another name, you might call
it ‘Chuck
Berry’”. When he was considered washed up in
America, Muddy Waters unexpectedly received an invitation
to tour in
Great Britain where
he was acclaimed as a pioneer of blues and rock music. He
was one of the musical greats.

From
the standpoint of race relations, the most significant
part of this story is the “cross over” of black
music to white audiences. Muddy Waters, the blues artist,
appealed mainly to blacks. His music was
played on black radio stations and in black clubs; but
the real money lay in appealing to whites. That’s
why it so was important, Leonard Chess explained, to get
disk jockey
Alan Freed (who invented the term “rock ‘n
roll”) to play Waters’ records on a white station
in Cleveland.

However,
the cross-over phenomenon really began with the music pioneered
by Chuck Berry. The film, “Cadillac
Records”, showed Berry
playing to an audience consisting of both black and white
fans. The two groups were separated by a rope. Some of
the whites crossed over into the
black section and soon it was a racially integrated event.
Chuck Berry, who refused to stay in segregated hotels,
sometimes slept in his car. At
night, white girls would come to him offering sex. This
is what most disturbed “white
America” - black men messing with their women.
Berry himself was sentenced to five years in prison for
transporting
an underage woman across
state lines.

Besides
Chess Records, recording studios such as Stax Records of Memphis
and Motown Records of
Detroit produced “black” music that crossed
over to white audiences. These reached a peak in the
1960s and early 1970s. Then came black superstars such
as Michael Jackson, youngest member of
the “Jackson 5”, whose 1982 album “Thriller” is
the best-selling album of all time. The Jackson 5 signed
with Motown in 1968 and soon produced four #1 hit singles.
Prince (Nelson) of Minneapolis
followed in Jackson’s steps with his 1984 hit, “Purple
Rain”.
By this time, pop music had become integrated with
video and film.

The
history of rock ‘n roll music
must, of course, include Elvis Presley. He was a
poor white boy from Tupelo, Mississippi, who had moved to
Memphis, Tennessee.
His parents gave him a guitar on his 11th birthday and
his uncle gave him guitar lessons. Unlike some of the other
white pioneers of rock ‘n roll, Elvis
did not consciously imitate black artists. His first influence
was Gospel music in an Assembly of God church. Young
Elvis was also a fan of the white Country
music star, Hank Snow, and of a hillbilly singer, “Mississippi
Slim” who
played on a Tupelo radio station. In Memphis, however,
he also hung out in places that featured black blues music
and
knew many of the artists, including B.B.
King. Presley had an ear for music of all sorts.

When
Elvis Presley broke out in the mid 1950s after several years
of career floundering, he was seen as a white man
who could sing
and act
like a black.
Sam Phillips,
who first recorded him in July 1953, is alleged to have
said: “If I could
find a white man who had the Negro sound and the Negro
feel, I could make a billion dollars.” That man
was Elvis. With his side burns and enigmatic sneer, he
resembled
the young white rebel made popular by James Dean. But
his musical
style was something else.

Before
he became famous, many who heard Elvis Presley on the radio thought
he was a
black singer. He was singing
the energetic,
impassioned
music
that had
emerged from blues. Evocative of black sexuality, he
swiveled
his hips on stage. Presley became known as “Elvis
the pelvis”. An FBI report described
his public performances as “a strip-tease with
clothes on.” Elvis's "motions
and gestures ... (were) ... like those of masturbation
or riding a microphone.” When
Elvis appeared on the Ed Sullivan show in September
1956, cameramen were instructed to show only the upper
part
of his body and exclude the swiveling hips.

Here
we had a rock ‘n roll singer with whom white audiences
could directly identity. There need be no “cross
over” from the black music scene.
In effect, however, Elvis did introduce “black
music” to the majority
white culture, and make it respectable, and eventually
dominant. Other artists of all races and nationalities
followed. Rock ‘n roll became, in Alan Freed’s
words, “a river of music that has absorbed
many streams: rhythm and blues, jazz, rag time, cowboy
songs,
country songs, folk songs. All have contributed
to the big beat." The music has gone international,
appealing to young (and middle-aged) people in all
places on earth.

That
is what I meant by the Sun persuading a man to take off his jacket
- in this case, the
jacket
of racial
separation.
For all
the talk about
black
peoples’ political
movements, racial integration might never have come
about in America by that approach alone. It took
cultural persuasion, in the form of sports heroes
and
rock ‘n roll musicians, to capture the hearts
of white people and make them change their minds
about the black race.

the
music finds receptive ears among white students

However,
there is something else in the mix which may be significant. That
would be white readiness to accept racial change. Far from having
to be pushed to accept black culture, they eagerly embraced it.
Those white teenagers at Chuck Berry performances or Elvis’ screaming
fans did not have to be sold on appreciating this type of music.
They wanted it on their own. They wanted this low-down, sensual
music for what it represented to them personally. The black experience
represented an alternative to their own parched lives. So that
is also a part of the story. White teenagers felt emotionally empty
because of the type of life they led. This music represented a
release from their own confinement. It represented personal freedom
- growing up to be an adult.

What
we are talking about here is education. Even if education today
is seen as a panacea for the problems of
youth, there is a dark side too.
Remember that, when a child goes to school, he gives up something else.
He gives up the personal freedom he had before he reached that age. In
the relatively unprogrammed environment of infancy and early childhood,
human beings learn many things. They develop their core identities.

In
the late 1960s, Americans were spending an average of 12.1 years
in school. They may have entered the educational system at the
age of five
and still been there in their late teens. Day after day, the students
sit at their desks listening to the teacher and doing exercises involving
the
mind. After school, they continue the routine with homework assignments.
They are lucky to be here, they are told, because education will get
them a better job. The tightly prescribed process then continues into
college
and then into a career. They are riding an escalator through life without
really living.

Think
of how the new black music must have affected white teenage boys
and girls when it came out in the ‘50s. For
all their misery, black people were at least experiencing life.
The blues singers sang of real
hopes and disappointments. In contrast with the sexually repressed
whites cooped up in school, a singer like Muddy Waters was out
there getting laid.

Muddy
Waters may have been a womanizer who cheated on his wife, but she
still loved him. His reputation did
not seem to suffer.
Having
grown
up dirt poor in Mississippi, Waters went on to fortune and fame
in the Chicago
blues scene; he was now driving a Cadillac. There was exuberant
passion in his life but only deferred gratification in what the
young whites
were being urged to pursue. Told they were privileged to be in
school, many
whites began to realize that they were missing something in their
lives.

White
students in America during the 1960s, like their counterparts in
other countries, rebelled against the system. Young,
middle-class
Americans
waged a political and cultural fight against what some called “plastic
America”; it was an institutionalized, corporatized type
of society. Young people craved more authentic identities. In
the music and life style
of the “counter-culture”, they sought refuge from
the artificial lives they seemed otherwise destined to assume.
Much
of their energy was
directed at denying their own social background including, in
some cases, their identity as pretentious, educated whites. They
wanted
to become someone
else.

Instead
of releasing young white people from their institutional chains,
higher education reached out more insistently to blacks.
It developed
special programs to attract minority students, and instituted
admissions quotas,
scholarships, and “Black Studies” programs. Academia
became a home for race radicals. While whites continued to be
herded into those
places of learning, blacks and other races were now joining them. “Muddy
Waters” was now being urged to prep himself for later success.
The life was being squeezed equally out of both races.